Luck be a Landlord Review

Luck be a Landlord is essentially a slot machine game that gives you some choice over the symbols that appear on the reels. The “landlord” aspect of the game is a superfluous conceit used to set your winnings target and the number of spins you have to reach it. The winnings are used to pay your ever-increasing rent, and if you fail to reach your target, you get kicked out of your place and the game ends. This is conveyed to you by a single screen of text – the game is entirely played on the slot machine.

The slot machine in the game plays like, well, a slot machine. Spin the reels and we’ll tell you if you won. The, ahem, spin that the game puts on this is that between spins you are given the option of adding a new symbol to the reels. Each symbol has an effect that is triggered if certain other symbols appear on the display after the reels stop. For example, if a bee ends up next to a flower, you will earn bonus coins. Some symbols will destroy another symbol, which can be convenient when you are stuck with a symbol that isn’t giving you any benefit because it doesn’t have any synergies with the other symbols on your reels. The goal here is to build a set of symbols with strong synergies so that you can generate the coins needed to pay your rent and advance to the next level.

While this may make it seem like this may turn a game of chance into one of skill, that’s not really the case here. The problem is that after each spin you’re given the choice of one of three symbols selected at random. You may start out with symbols that work towards a good combination, and then hit a run of bad luck in which you simply do not have the option to work with the synergies that you started out with. The game tries to mitigate this issue somewhat by allowing you to proceed without adding a new symbol to the reels, but while this may protect you from a disastrous draw, it doesn’t allow you to build up the necessary set of symbols to increase your spin winnings to the point that you’ll be able to make rent. When you start getting a little deeper into a run, there are a lot of potential interactions that you need to keep track of, especially to avoid introducing a detrimental combo into the mix. Even though the game allows you to view your collection of symbols before choosing a new one, it’s still not too easy to sort out all of the various combinations of interactions your symbols could trigger.

While the idea of turning slots into a deck-building style game may sound intriguing, Luck be a Landlord is still primarily a game of chance. It does deserve some credit for holding my interest longer than any slots game has before, but that’s a pretty low bar to cross. You may spend a little time just to see what kind of symbols the game has and how they interact, but after that you’re back to “spin the wheels and we’ll tell you if you’ve won”.